Fwd: V-2nd: Pondering Paola

[Michael Bailey]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 4:35 PM
Subject: Re: V-2nd: Pondering Paola
To: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>


> Hod abuses Paola. She seems rather shell shocked, suffering from a
> PTSD. Malta was bombed away. She seeks comfort, but finds none. The
> men who chase her are all turned into swine.
>

again, a good point, to which I'd only append, that it's not hard to
mpute (and for that matter, extend) some empathy to Pappy too,
Nothing excuses mistreatment, that's for sure...

but part of my point about V. for victory was the Pyrrhic element, how
one is left with a slew of traumatized people on all sides; how after
having fought to put down fascism, one's faced with systemic inequity
enforced by violence that's hard to ignore, among people one's grown
accustomed to thinking of as the good guys...

Paola surely is one of them, Pappy another - surely there's a place (a
summer place...) where a reader can without excusing abuse still feel
sympathy for an abuser's own suffering - "Pappy Hod was telling
disaster stories, really funny ones..." a disaster as huge as WWII
(or, more germanely perhaps to V., the entire 20th Century?) shared by
many, is a basis for commiseration, a whole generation of people who
had to gather their bloomin' arses up off the floor, and not all of
them even had the comfort of a banana to do it with, and after all
their heroism, meeting the new boss same as the old boss

"Austin, the Cold War's over"
"Good!  Finally those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes!  Eh?
Eh, comrades?"
"Austin, we won!"
"Eau...Smashing...yay capitalism..."

talking with Davy who's still in the Navy and probably will be for life...
Pappy Hod's panoply of skills and charms enough to attract Paola but
not to hold her,
feels his dream slipping away, to lash out with his gnarled fists and
Popeye forearms is surely a personal failing, and a good reader will
repudiate it but also squirrel away how it must feel to not be
loved, and one's affections not valued, and one's offerings taken
without recompense, and the moment of feeling unreasonable triumph at
an unlikely conquest passed and a long time of feeling like an old
fool, than which there's no fool like, setting in...



--
Yippy dippy dippy,
Flippy zippy zippy,
Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
- Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")



-- 
Yippy dippy dippy,
Flippy zippy zippy,
Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
- Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")